wrestle87

The two that will forever share the wrestling walkout crown: The one that wrestling missed out on:

Yikes. Yeah put a check in the headache box 100%. Dang, that’s gnarly, you guys had a great doctor.

This terrifies me. I rented a place once that had been on the market for a little while, slept one night in it, woke up the next day after the worst nightmare and in the worst mood I can recall ever waking up in. Pretty darn sure that was carbon monoxide.

I'm going to be very contrarian and say Truax beats Pinto something like 5-2 or 7-2. Pinto has precisely one move that he can hit semi-reliably, it's his goofy muscle right underhook with the back hand blocking behind his opponent's left leg. It's like he watched a trent hidlay highlight an just said "yeah, I'll give it a shot". Nagao, also overranked this whole year. He has super flexible hips laterally, and could throw in some mean boots and sit the corner. These, however, are not exactly new techniques, and he's pretty easy to scout. I'd also guess he's experiencing a weird transition right now, kinda like what snyder went through when he first moved to Happy Valley, he legit got worse for about a year as he was working on new principals and techniques. He also likely wasn't able to hit what used to work for him in the room, which took away his practice an confidence in his old moves, at a time when he also had minimal confidence or ability to execute his new ones. I think Nagao is going through this same transition right now. He's probably being told to try different things on the mat, aka leave his old game behind in favor of something that may fit his frame better long term, but that means he's less confident in his skillset overall right now.

Now I’m picturing Terry Brands face on Patrick Swayze’s body from Point Break. Who are the coaches who most resemble Bodhi and Johnny Utah? That could really be the making of a great coaching staff for a SoCal team.

wtf? Virtually all of the field is banged up in some way right now, it’s just a matter of how well they deal with it. Sometimes, they deal with it poorly and it impacts their wrestling notably, but they keep it quiet bc that’s what you do in a sport that is about folding your opponent into shapes against their will. This is an understood undercurrent to every wrestling season since the advent of the sport. Are you ignoring this and just saying people who have significant experience with the sport are all just tilting at windmills?

This is the old, now regularly rehashed story coming out of Iowa. Yes TnT have great success, but they are dyed in the wool old guard coaches who are still reading from the same playbook gable handed them. They are the purest athlete distillate of the gable era, but without the athlete knowhow that gable has, and Cael clearly has too, just in a different way. If anyone on here has read Gable’s old coaching books, he talked tirelessly about the importance of understanding athletes as individuals, and maintaining the right headspace for the athlete. Now, he clearly only got a specific cross-section of the population coming to him, those who were willing to put up with him or who thought like him, bc wrestling is the outlet for his own internal rage. He just drove guys so hard and so emblematically that the style embossed itself on the sport for 40 years. Then Ben Askren came along, as the first glimmer of a different way, and Cael has meaningfully refined his approach to the mental side of things. It is so clear that PSU has figured out the mental side of approaching competition as fierce as wrestling, that everyone who touches the program improves. Listen to any of the (rare) interviews PSU guys give about mindset and the focus from Cael, they all deemphasize the heightened negative emotions associated with competition. The next major difference, I believe to be the largest, and also directly related to the mental side of things, is PSU attracts guys and they don’t leave. TnT meanwhile have burnt bridges right and left with their best athletes, tirelessly chasing the next thing instead of developing a good base of young graduates to support the ranks. They have a very bad (high) rate of eventually betraying their best guys or running them out of the program. Go back and look at their guys who have won ncaa titles during their tenure, and count how many are still involved in the Hawkeye program or have a good thing to say about those guys. The number is low. For anecdotal evidence, let’s individually remember the stories of metcalf, ramos, gilman, and spencer lee to name a few. I don’t know St John’s story, but they missed on him too. Ultimately, certain personalities and coaching strategies are short term effective, long term caustic. Others actually succeed in building positively in the long term. The old school coaches are on the way out, the new school are dominating the sport (askren and cael). They have a more comprehensive system which yields better outcomes, and it is really coming into sharp form with this cohort of athletes. We all know who the best coach ever is, he just hasn't been at it long enough to have accumulated the titles.

Yeah, that’s going to become one of those retherford sorenson deals, a decision becomes a major becomes a tech-pin-mauling

Why is this a thing? Who cares?

Let's not forget Desanto as well. And even though they never won their respective weight classes, they had their best performances at Iowa. For most of them, the transfer in is a desire to be around a heartier wrestling culture. Stanford and Drexel certainly don't offer that, and Franek/Caliendo happened because Kish left North Dakota State. Eierman I'm just guessing was killing everyone in the room and obviously wasn't progressing, bc he was raised in the system and probably felt like had squeezed everything he could out of Mizzou's goofy/funkfest style of wrestling.

neutral danger is 90 degrees, that was a 3 count. Robb wrestled the better match, but, once again, that was a missed call by the ref. I really think a lot of these missed calls are old habits by referees dying hard, sort of like wrestlers chasing a reversal for just two points instead of going escape takedown, which nets you two extra points.

Does anyone on here know anyone who's wrestled Lewan? Everyone who gets on the mat with him behaves like they are grabbing a person made of stone.

Also this Michigan team is as streaky as they come. These guys could be 3rd or 13th at NCAA's this year.

Gomez is looking remarkably like a one trick pony here. He needs to talk with Vito's guy. He took out Yianni, but also comes out and decides that corkscrew headlocks are the way to go against the #1 guy in the country.

Lemley gave him the ol' Jon Jones special with that thumb to the eye

Old habits die hard, chain wrestling used to value that more, now it is effectively just an escape unless you get a rideout

Midwest folks, is it a common thing for a mystery "h" to sneak in at the end of the word "height" out where you are, or is it just a wrestling world thing?

Ah, so he was really sick of hearing the chirping from his former lady friend's new guy...

This has definitely happened. Many of the best guys usually show up with ~15-20 matches on the books for the season at NCAA's, meaning they enter their conference tournament with 10-15. I think this development is part of a transition that college wrestling is undergoing, both in terms of the goals of the program and the capabilities of the athletes. Factor #1: To be a good college guy, you need to have international aspirations. The level of wrestling that the average 20 year old is bringing to the mat has gone up tremendously in the past 10 years. Folkstyle is not the only metric that programs are evaluated on, and even previously folkstyle-heavy programs are making their way towards international styles. I think college coaches are scheduling match-load on an annual basis, factoring in peaking for international tournaments and international styles, bc there are definitely kids who excel more at those styles than folkstyle. If that's the case, why beat up their bodies for limited return on a folkstyle mat when they can bring you a world medal in another style? Perfect examples of this are Braxton Amos, Taylor Lamont, and Ryan Mango, to name a few. If these guys hadn't been put through it for folkstyle, they would have been much fresher for international competition. Factor #2: There are no good midseason tournaments anybody cares about anymore. Midlands isn't even a shell of it former self, it's faint shadow. And the scuffle, which killed midlands is also headed the same way. I lay this mostly at the feet of the season being too long, and coaches seeing minimal benefit to beating their kids up around the holidays and still 2-3 months out from NCAA's. Nobody ever looks back and says "Yeah that person was great, they won midlands, or they won the scuffle" College wrestling is a one-tournament sport. Nobody cares what happened during the regular season, and this, selectively, makes the regular season less meaningful year over year.

Related to this, for the Iowa faithful, who are you most pleasantly surprised with in terms of their development or performance this year? Iowa doesn't have a ton of blue chip names in the lineup, but nevertheless the room has still seen a lot of guys step up and keep Iowa very much in the discussion all year. Glazier has already done the entire wrestling community a tremendous favor this year...

So is this the "he was really sick the morning of the dual" situation? Or was he actually sick the morning of Okie State?

Thanks for posting that. And wow, I particularly enjoyed how the coverage just jumped for a solid minute during one of the most exciting segments of one of the most exciting matches, that was really nice.

Cardenas could totally be wearing a Michigan M next year. He legit looks like he could fit in very well there, Miles Amine is in the room, I think Deiringer still is, and the potential of havinb Griffith and Davison if they choose to go after freestyle stuff. That is a stacked room. Obviously, the only better room for someone his size would be where Dake went to, but that would be so predictably boring.

Oh yeah, Iowa guys go out there and fall flat all the time. I would say the Carver experience is probably what makes them all outperform at NCAA's, bc even big tens and NCAA's are a less charged environment than Carver.

I might venture that out of the Ivies, Brown is the school which is least supportive of its athletics. While doing rather well with business placement and having strong grad programs, the school is also a notable hippy farm, which is an identity they very much embrace. It is also typically an identity for which organized athletics is completely anathema. I hope they get better and have stronger support, but Brown is pretty close to the bottom of all D1 programs both in terms of success and long term viability.